With Dad dead and the move to Ambergris having unmoored Mom from any last vestiges of parental regard, I became Duncan’s mother in many ways. I made sure he got up in time for school. I made him breakfast. I helped him with his homework. I made sure he got to bed on time. He stopped copying me and started obeying me. (… Although with a smoldering disrespect for authority as embodied by my suddenly strict sister. But I’m lying. I welcomed it. I needed some structure. I needed someone to tell me what to do back then. I was still just a child. And a frequently scared one, despite all of my explorations. To take the lead while exploring seemed natural; to take the lead in everyday life was monstrously difficult.) Gone was the admiration, perhaps, but so too the corrosive disease of competition. At least, back then.

Somehow, despite our rough knowledge and this change in our roles, we managed to fit in, to get along, to come to feel part of Ambergris with greater ease than might have been expected. Much of it had to do with our attitude, I think. Duncan and I should have been upset about leaving our old school and friends behind, but we weren’t. Not really. In a sense, it came as a great relief to escape the pity and concern others showed us, which trapped us in an image of ourselves as victims. Freedom from that meant, in a way, freedom from the moment of our father’s death. This made up for the other dislocations.

(Dare I deprive the reader of that first glimpse of Ambergris? That first teasing glimpse during the carriage ride from the docks? That glimpse, and then the sprawl of Albumuth Boulevard, half staid brick, half lacquered timber? The dirt of it, the stench of it, half perfume, half ribald rot. And another smell underneath it—the tantalizing scent of fungi, of fruiting bodies, of spores entangled with dust and air, spiraling down like snow. The cries of vendors, the cries of the newly robbed, or the newly robed. The first contact of shoe on street out of the carriage—the resounding solidity of that ground, and the humming vibration of coiled energy beneath the pavement, conveyed up through shoe into foot, and through foot into the rest of a body suddenly energized and woken up. The sudden hint of heat to the air—the possibilities!—and, peeking from the storm drains, from the alleyways, the enticing, lingering darkness that spoke of tunnels and sudden exploration. One cannot mention our move to Ambergris without setting that scene, surely! That boulevard became our touchstone, in those early years, as it had to countless people before us. It was how you traveled into Ambergris, and it was how they carried you out when you finally left.)